Sauce for the Gander

Assume you are a small business owner – say a dozen or so employees.

The IRS audits your business tax return and says you’re underreporting your income. There’s no evidence for this, of course, but the IRS doesn’t need evidence. You’re guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent. (Hey, what happened to due process? Oh, didn’t you hear? That doesn’t apply to the IRS gestapo.)

The IRS launches a massive invasion of privacy against you, telling you all the records you’re required to produce going back seven years, among them emails. In other words, you’ll be investigated not only for their specific allegation, but also, while the IRS is at it, they will go on a fishing expedition to see if they catch any other misdeeds. You are, after all, presumed to be in a perpetual state of IRS guilt.

Notwithstanding what records you produce, it isn’t good enough. IRS gun-toting goons show up at your place of work and confiscate your computers, servers, and paper files. The fact that this effectively puts you out of business is of no concern to them. (I personally observed them padlock a friend’s retail store during shopping hours for suspected underpayment of payroll tax.)

An investigation of your computers reveals no digital trail past the time that the IRS investigation of your firm began. An explanation is demanded.

“Well, uh, you see sir, the computer system crashed,” you say.

“All twelve of them?” the lead inquisitor asks incredulously.

“Unfortunately so,” you say. “Darndest thing I ever saw. Came in one morning and they were toast – dead as doornails.”

“And the servers?” asks the inquisitor.

“Them too,” says you.

Inquisitor: “Where are they? Where’re the drives?”

You: “Shredded I reckon. No good, you know.”

Multiple choice pop quiz: “At this point, the IRS is likely to (a) curse and terminate the investigation for lack of evidence, (b) charge you with a crime, (c) believe you’re telling the truth and invite you to lunch – at his expense.”

Those of us who have been audited know that this story is pretty much factual down to the start of the dialog. No doubt your sympathies were on the side of the guy being hounded by the IRS.

Reading the dialog, however, I’ll bet you thought, “Oops, this dog won’t hunt.” Okay, maybe you didn’t think exactly in those terms. But I’ll bet you were thinking something equivalent to, “Anyone who would believe the story of crashed drives would buy the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Well that’s what the folks at the IRS (aka Comedy Central’s joke-writing affiliate) would have us believe – “us” being you and me and members of Congress investigating the allegation that the civil rights of targeted groups were suppressed by those wonderful folks who ruin every April 15. The President breaks the law with impunity, after all. Why shouldn’t the IRS?

We know for a fact that Obama and the Senate and House ranking Democrats ran a smear campaign against conservative organizations in the run-up to the 2010 election. That’s a matter of public record, spoken publicly and reported by the complicit mainstream media. We know that Obama and his congressional Myrmidons publicly urged the IRS to investigate these organizations and revoke or refuse their tax exemptions on donations – that’s also public knowledge. All the usual suspects – Chucky Schumer, Carl Levin, Dickey Durbin, and Elijah Cummings (the minority party Co-Chair of the House committee which is investigating the IRS, chaired by Representative Darrell Issa, R-CA) – were up to their armpits in conspiracy complaints they’d written to the IRS about conservative groups.

We also know that Lois Lerner ran a political hit campaign inside of the IRS. We know she took the Fifth after blaming every targeting action, memo, meeting, telephone call, decision, and lunar eclipse on “that office of rogues over in Cincinnati.” Anyone who believes that, line up for the weekly sale of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Additionally we know that Lerner shipped a database of 12,000 non-profit tax returns to the Criminal Division of the FBI, which has no jurisdiction over taxpayers, inviting them to go on a fishing expedition. “Look around, boys. Nobody’s perfect. Surely you’ll find something.” Unauthorized disclosure of confidential taxpayer information is a crime – even among government agencies.

What we don’t know is whether the IRS and elected officials – Obama and the congressional Democrats – collaborated to use the power of government in suppressing the political rights of a group. If that could be shown, it would be a crime. Some folks might go to Big Boy prison.

So, last week as the noose tightened around the neck of a government official who had pled her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination, we learn (a) her computer hard drive crashed in 2011 when the investigation following the 2010 election began, (b) the hard drives of six other IRS employees implicated in this developing scandal also crashed – darndest coincidence, (c) that rather than recover the data on the hard drives – standard practice where I work – they were shredded, quite likely in violation of the Federal Records Act,  (d) the hard drives on the mail servers also crashed and were shredded – wow! must have been an outbreak of something, (e) that there has been no back up of the mail system or network hard drives in two years! – now, where’d ya’ say that Bridge is? (f) that there was no fail-over system in case hard drives start crashing – also standard practice in my office – which would make possible the restoration of lost data, (g) that there were no offsite mirror servers to run in tandem in case of a catastrophic failure – like the place burns down – and prevent the loss of billions and billions of irreplaceable taxpayer records, also SOP – can you believe it? – and saving the best for last, (h) when the new guy, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, took over this Singapore cesspool around the first of the year, he learned in February that “computer problems” had happened, yet he promised Issa’s committee later that spring that Lerner’s emails would be delivered forthwith. That’s called lying under oath in my family – a definite no-no.

Lots and lots of coincidences here – long strings of coincidences, in fact – are making cooperation with Darrel Issa’s committee investigation of IRS wrong-doing dang nigh impossible. Of course, I don’t believe for a heartbeat that most are true, but it’s going to take a Special Prosecutor to get the information and charge someone with a crime. Maybe someone in the IRS will get nervous and ‘fess up or rat out the bad guys and gals.

Memo to John Koskinen: Hey, Kosk; since you guys stopped using the IRS abacus network a while back and switched to the modern invention we call computer networks, well you may not know this, Kosk, but you see, when ol’ Lois there and her fellow conspirators were connected to the network, their keystrokes weren’t writing on the hard drive under their desks; they were writing out on the network drives, so the only thing their drive crashes did was create a bad smell. Might want to tidy up your story before your next congressional appearance. I think Issa is getting royally torqued over all these unbelievables happening in the middle of his investigation.

“What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” my Granny used to say. But there’s no gander sauce when it comes to government. It cheats.

You and I are expected to retain seven years’ of taxpayer information available on demand, abide by laws requiring the payment of confiscatory taxes by a minority of income earners while a majority pay little or none, cooperate fully in any investigatory audit that seeks to indict us for not paying Caesar his full pound of flesh including interest and penalties, suffer the presumption of guilt and the adverse consequences of incomplete or lost records, and annually engage experts to complete tax returns for an arcane revenue code that makes the Minoan maze of the Minotaur look like a nine letter crossword puzzle.

Here we have an unimpeachable example of open air law-breaking that is being defended by political interests in the Democrat party who believe obeying the law is just a quaint practice. Where is the public outrage? Why isn’t the Obama approval rating below the 13% Congress is getting?

What the IRS apologists would have us believe that we have here is a government department with the undisputed power of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, charged with the administration of taking in trillions of dollars every year, year after year, with all the record-keeping attendant thereto, yet doing so with Stone Age era technology, we’re told, upon which all the plagues that Moses and God could release 3,500 years ago seem to have been revisited recently, all the while laboring to discharge its duties loyally like good little civil “servants” while right-wing congressional zealots attack them with stupid questions and subpoenas. 

Anyone who believes that, line up over here on the Left.

Brooklyn Bridge, straight ahead.

An American Gestapo

"From its creation in 1933 until its death in May 1945, anyone living in Nazi controlled territory lived in fear of a visit from the Gestapo..."
-- Gestapo: A History of Hitler's Secret Police

In its day the Gestapo was the enforcement arm of German political power. It could investigate anyone for any reason unfettered by democratic restraints. Not even a general’s uniform provided protection from its reach.

As its reputation for heavy-handed enforcement grew, Gestapo power also grew. Beginning as a small group of 300 career and supposedly legitimate policemen in 1933, which operated out of a small office and relied on index cards to keep track of suspicious people, the Gestapo grew in number and “legitimacy” that allowed it to snoop unrestricted on an entire nation. In less than a decade the German people became so intimidated by this government agency that they relinquished asserting their rights as free citizens in order to avoid attracting attention that could bring a knock on their door in the middle of the night.

Does this description sound similar to any agency of American government? Which federal agency is feared by Americans as the Germans came to fear the Gestapo? The Defense Department? CIA? FBI? The IRS?

As I’ve noted in many previous blog posts, the central purpose on which our Republic was founded was a mistrust of a central government. Law-abiding citizens in the 18th century were willing to fight a war against the most powerful military in the world in order to throw off the shackles of government abuse. Were those patriots to come back from the grave today, they would be shocked to see the extent to which government routinely abridges the freedom of its citizens. They would be more shocked that it’s tolerated. Among the multiplicity of agencies we’ve grown to tolerate as our federal government metastasizes to every corner of our lives, none is more feared, none more powerful, and none more flagrant in its abuse of the rights of citizens than the IRS. Of all the other things it does, at its core the IRS is a police function. And with the passage of ObamaCare, which agency was assigned its enforcement? The IRS!

No agency of government can be given the power possessed by the IRS without abusing it. PERIOD. No matter how restrictively it is regulated by law, no matter how conscientiously its operation is managed, no matter how closely overseen by Congress, there is too much power centralized in the IRS. Its history provides the proof. In the years following the 16th Amendment, the IRS has been stained by scandal after scandal. But instead of being weakened by scandal, each outrage seemed to embolden it even more to withstand reform attempts.

Today, once again we find IRS misbehavior at the center of a controversy. As news about it dribbles out, this one seems to have been underway at least since 2010 if not from the first year of the Obama administration. And just so I’m on record in this debate as an equal opportunity critic of the IRS, members of both political parties in both the White House and Congress have abused the public trust by using the IRS to punish and intimidate their enemies. Even Presidents have unleashed the IRS dogs on members of Congress, although I know of no case where the reverse was true.

It is illegal for the federal government to target specific groups or people for tax enforcement, but the President and Congress have done so with impunity. Moreover, there is ample evidence that the IRS has exercised power on its own volition. While the media present the current scandal as a small rogue initiative in the Cincinnati office, the evidence paints a national campaign directed at tea party conservatives whose harassment may have tipped the outcome of the 2012 election. No smoking gun has been found in the White House – yet – but Jeffrey Lord writing for American Spectator this past Monday may be on to a trail that leads to Obama. If so, Watergate II may in in the making.

First, a bit of background.

James Bovard has made a career out of exposing government shenanigans that infringe on the rights of citizens by publishing a string of books. These books have been denounced by a veritable Who’s Who of past administration cabinet secretaries and government agency executives who found themselves on the wrong end of Bovard’s pen. Last week the Wall Street Journal published an excellent article by him entitled “A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting” which can be found at the link in this sentence. It’s well worth reading but allow me to hit the highlights so that I can thoroughly infuriate you before concluding this week’s blog.

Bovard, calling upon David Burnham’s book, A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power, cites "In almost every administration since the IRS's inception the information and power of the tax agency have been mobilized for explicitly political purposes." FDR used the IRS to make life miserable for his political opponents and the critics of his New Deal. JFK used news conferences to announce that he expected the IRS to police “the discordant voices of extremism” (i.e. people who distrusted political leaders) and investigate their tax-exempt status.

Had Kennedy signed an Executive Order it couldn’t have been more effective in mobilizing the IRS to suppress conservative groups. Within days the IRS targeted the American Enterprise Institute, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, and other right-leaning organizations. Oh, and how well I remember Kennedy unleashing the IRS dogs of war on the executives of steel companies who refused to go along with his price controls in the 1960s. All found themselves targets of tax audits.

Tricky Dick Nixon was infamous for his paranoia and the enemies list that grew out of it. He wasn’t shy about using the IRS Gestapo to spy and snoop on over 10,000 people on his list. When Watergate brought him down, John Dean, his personal lawyer, revealed that Nixon "use[d] the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." In this case “federal machinery” was a euphemism for the IRS.

The Clinton White House employed the IRS to conduct more than 20 audits of conservative organizations – the Heritage Foundation and American Spectator among them – which were critical of his policies, and IRS audits fell also on those critical of his libido, among them Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones.

Toward the end of the Clinton era, the Associated Press (itself the subject of government intimidation at the moment) reported that "officials in the Democratic White House and members of both parties in Congress have prompted hundreds of audits of political opponents in the 1990s." There were "personal demands for audits from members of Congress" that gave the IRS only 15 days to do its dirty work if requests were marked "expedite" or "hot politically." Of course, requests to audit an enemy were appropriately camouflaged to prevent identifying the congressman who wanted to harass a citizen who’d “dissed” him. Since both parties engaged in these practices there was no hoots or howls calling for investigation like today.

Over 40 years ago, Sen. Joe Montoya of New Mexico announced plans to hold hearings looking into IRS abuses. The IRS responded by putting his name on a list of tax protesters capable of violence against agents. Over 22 years ago the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics conducted a survey of 800 IRS executives and managers which revealed that three out of four felt no compunction about lying to a Congressional committee. About 15 years ago a client of my accountant wrote a critical letter to the IRS and two gun-packing agents showed up on his doorstep. The IRS is beyond criticism, beyond scrutiny, and beyond governance. It answers to no one except superficially.

Taking a cue from JFK’s tactics, Obama’s 2012 campaign singled out a number of Romney supporters by name. Among them was Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot whom Obama called a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other Romney supporters were characterized by Obama as "on the wrong side of the law." Republican PACs and Tea Party 501(c)(4) organizations were targeted by Obama by questioning whether their funding was coming from overseas. Obama used "tea baggers" as a pejorative and Biden called them "terrorists."

The IRS didn’t need a memo from the White House. It got the clue and it got to work sandbagging the enemies of The Boss. VanderSloot's divorce records were investigated. The IRS audited the VanderSloot’s tax returns for the past two years. The Department of Labor conducted an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. Then he got notice of yet another tax audit. The harassment continues. His tax refunds have been held up and his legal bills have passed the $80,000 mark.

Tea Party organizations applied for tax exempt status during the 2012 election cycle. Exemptions would allow them to raise funds and advance their candidate preferences. Their applications were stonewalled by the IRS review process and many folded, unable to stay in operation until their exemptions came through. The IRS asked applicants for outrageous information – the mission of the organization and the people involved with it, including board members, donors and speakers at its events. An Ohio group was asked to write a synopsis of a 350-page book its members had studied. They were given two weeks to comply.

None other than Franklin Graham, son of the evangelical icon, suffered the consequences of voicing his beliefs which ran counter to White House ideology. Two of Graham’s non-profits were audited during the 2012 election campaign after the organizations took out ads urging people to support biblical principles in their choice of political candidates. Graham sent a blistering letter to Obama about the audits after learning that conservative groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their name were being disproportionately audited or investigated by the IRS. "This is morally wrong and unethical – indeed some would call it 'un-American'" Graham said. He may as well have saved the postage.

How is this possible in “the land of the free?”

It’s no secret that Obama is a friend of labor unions, among them the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU.) It represents 150,000 government employees in the IRS and 30 other agencies, making it the most powerful government union in operation. Visitor logs show that one of the first “low level” visitors to the White House in Obama’s first term was Colleen Kelley, a 14-year veteran of the IRS and president of the NTEU. Kelley is recorded as visiting the White House on December 3, 2009 at 6:30 pm to attend the White House Christmas party, the first of the new Obama administration. Kelley was one of four labor activists invited. Heady stuff.

Six days after the party, Obama issued Executive Order 13522, “Creating Labor-Management Forums to Improve Delivery of Government Services,” whose purpose was to “allow employees and unions to have pre-decisional involvement in all workplace matters….” The EO gave the NTEU the clout to determine IRS employee policies, right down to who was given a government-paid Blackberry and what office size an IRS employee was allowed.

In other words, the EO let the inmates run the asylum.

Since the NTEU is the most active anti-Tea Party union in government, Obama’s EO was his Christmas gift. On March 31, 2010 Kelley again visited the White House according to visitor logs. The Inspector General auditing the IRS scandal says in its report that the day following this meeting the IRS ratcheted up its schemes to target Tea Party and conservative groups.

The NTEU raised $613,633 in the 2010 cycle, 98% of which went to anti-Tea Party Democrat candidates. Nevertheless, Democrats suffered massive political losses in the mid-term elections including the loss of the House majority and six seats in the Senate. State government gains went to the Republicans on a large scale.

Therefore, payday came again for the boss of the IRS union. One week after Obama and Democrats suffered their historic midterm losses, Obama appointed Kelley to the Federal Salary Council whose job is to recommend pay raises for IRS and other federal employees. The NTEU PAC thanked Obama by raising $729,708 in the 2012 cycle, of which 94% went to anti-Tea Party candidates.

The Treasury Inspector General of Tax Administration completed his audit of the IRS targeting in September 2012. (An audit is not an investigation.) Someone decided its findings should not be released until May 2013 – after the election. When the 54-page audit report was released last Tuesday, it was clear that the IRS was involved in a crime – the use of government power to suppress anti-Democrat political speech. Obama acted outraged and fired Steven Miller, the acting IRS Commissioner. Big deal! Miller was scheduled to retire in weeks. He will be receiving a taxpayer-funded pension, notwithstanding his firing.

Darrell Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has its hands full lately keeping up with all of the Obama scandals. It is presently investigating three of them – the IRS, Benghazi, and the revelation that the Department of Justice secretly subpoenaed the private phone records of several Associated Press reporters and editors in the wake of a terrorist plot leak. Despite his newly-unemployed status, Miller was subpoenaed by the Issa committee.

Miller’s testimony before the House Committee was little more than a replay of the Abbott and Costello baseball parody, “Who’s On First.” Representative Kevin Brady (R-TX) asked Miller, “Who is responsible for targeting these individuals?”

Miller: “I don’t have names for you.”

After several rounds of “I used to know but now I’ve forgotten,” Representative Dave Reichert (R-WA) confronted Miller: “I’m disappointed. I’m hearing, ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t recall. I don’t believe.’ Who knew? You don’t even know who investigated the case, but yet you say it was investigated … You’re not instilling a lot of confidence.” Reichert continued the questioning of Miller, asking who did IRS adviser Nancy Marks identify as the person responsible for the IRS targeting policy. Miller’s response: “I don’t remember.”

It’s unfathomable that the most illegal order given by the IRS, one that is likely to send one or more people to prison, can’t be recalled by the person in charge of the agency! Maybe Miller’s memory will clear if he is implicated as a candidate for prison time.

The Democrats are facing some serious losses in the 2014 midterm elections. Their cause was not helped, however, by Lois Lerner, the person in charge of granting IRS tax exemptions. She appeared before Issa’s Committee Wednesday. Her lawyer had warned she would plead the 5th Amendment if she was called before the committee, and that’s what she did. What’s noteworthy about Lerner’s appearance, however, is that she brought a lawyer. The presence of a lawyer in a congressional hearing is a clue that the client could be facing criminal charges. After making an opening statement (which may have voided her 5th Amendment rights) Lerner “took the 5th” on every question put to her. A furious Democrat, Representative Stephen Lynch (D-MA), warned Lerner that there’d be “hell to pay” for her obfuscation, possibly in the form of a special prosecutor, if she and other IRS officials maintained their code of silence to Congress’ questions.

Lerner was placed on administrative leave Thursday when newly-appointed Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel asked her to resign and she refused. Concerning Werfel’s “acting” status, Jay Leno quipped, "They're called 'acting commissioner' because you have to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."

In her essay on government, Ayn Rand wrote:

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

The latest IRS scandal is the legacy of this 100-year old agency writ large – another example that too much power is concentrated in this single agency.  If we are to escape the fulfillment of Rand’s prophecy, the IRS must be broken up and reconstituted as multiple independent, non-collaborative agencies.

The break-up of the IRS could defang the current model but it would only be a band aid. The underlying problem – the way government is funded – would remain unchanged: i.e. the century-old decision to tax income. Once that Pandora’s Box was opened it unleashed a flurry of imponderables: what is income, when is it taxable, and when is it exempt?

Unlike absolutes such as the case for gravity, there is no absolute to define income. That must be decided by arbitrary judgment, which inevitably conveys power upon the judge. However guileless the judge may be, arbitrariness in any form is despotic. It grants fiat power to one party while withholding it from another party. This is the antithesis of a free society.

The power to enforce tax compliance and the power to abuse are first cousins. We will continue to struggle with the flaws of the current system until we cease to tax income.

Fast and Infuriating -- Part II

(continued from last week’s blog post, Fast and Infuriating – Part I. Please read it first if you haven’t)

With the testimony of the F&F whistleblowers complete, it was the government’s turn to face the Issa committee investigation. The committee’s questions centered on what and when did Holder and Obama know about F&F. More contradictions – or lies, take your pick. Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) grilled Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich (DOJ). Again, space limits putting the entire testimony in this blog, but Representative Chaffetz seems to have captured his frustration nicely in this response to one of Weich’s evasions:

… what I don’t understand is, when you go back and look at the record, President Obama knew about it back in March. If the President knew about it, why didn’t the Attorney General know about it? And why are you issuing a memo in May, when the President of the United States, in an interview with, I believe, Univision, is saying we know that there were some mistakes made? How does that happen? The President makes this comment, and then, still, months later, you have the gall to issue a memo to this Congress saying that it is just false, it is not true. That does not add up.

In July, Issa received secret testimony from Acting ATF Director Melson who, after being blocked from speaking for months, was told by DOJ that he could testify outside of his official capacity with a personal attorney present. He confirmed DOJ’s knowledge of F&F, unauthorized wiretaps, and the gruesome details of F&F tactics his department had used. Much to Issa’s surprise, Melson became physically ill as he revealed the gritty details of F&F and he appeared to be distancing himself from DOJ. Melson revealed that the unwillingness to cooperate was because the "wagons were being circled around Obama’s political appointees."

But the Obama administration wasn’t ready to play softball. On August 15,2011William Burns, the Deputy Secretary of State reporting to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Mexico to meet with its Foreign Secretary. Pavlich would not reveal her source which gave her the content of the meeting, because it was provided on the condition of anonymity, but Pavlich says the source is credible. Burns gave the Mexican government an ultimatum. Mute its criticism of F&F or forego the $500 million that the US paid Mexico under the Merida Initiative to combat drug violence and traffic. After that meeting the official outrage from Mexico abated.

In 1986 Congress passed the Whistleblower Act and No Fear Act expressly to protect people who come forward to disclose corruption and illegality in government activities. The DOJ is responsible for enforcing these laws, but when it comes to DOJ misbehavior, we have a classic fox in the hen house protection system. DOJ, FBI, IRS, Homeland Security, Immigration, and the DEA rarely worked independently on the same case – each had members on the F&F team.

So when ATF Agent Jay Dobyns infiltrated the Hells Angels gang, dozens of its members were sent to prison, blowing his cover. A contract was put out on him which involved kidnapping him and injecting him with the AIDS virus, kidnapping and torturing his 15-year old daughter, and kidnapping his wife to videotape her being gang raped. Dobyns reported this to Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, asking for protection of his family. Newell refused. Newell had a reputation for punishing those who questioned his authority, so when Dobyns told others in ATF that he and his family were denied protection by Newell, Newell was determined to make Dobyns life a living hell since he couldn’t fire him.

Shortly afterward, Dobyns house was set on fire at 3a as his family slept inside. Although all escaped safely, Newell doubled down. He accused Dobyns of setting the fire. That served only to infuriate Dobyns’ friends who reported Newell to his superiors in Washington. Later investigation by the Inspector General confirmed that indeed Dobyns was denied reasonable protection from a work-related threat. Yet Newell was never reprimanded or removed from office. He remained head of the Phoenix office when Obama took office.

When John Dodson complained about the laxity of F&F operation, his rifle was taken away and every agent in the Phoenix office was told that if they expected to have a career with ATF they had best stay away from Dodson. He was no longer allowed to participate in operations. His supervisor, David Voth, required unnecessary written reports of his daily activities. Ultimately, his ATF badge was taken and he was transferred to the FBI. When Dodson gave testimony to Issa’s committee and refused to sign a retraction, he was confronted by a supervisor in a hall of the Phoenix office who screamed that any agent who communicated with Dodson would find it detrimental to his ATF career.

Vince Cefalu always wanted to be a cop. His hero was Frank Serpico, the New York cop who exposed police corruption in the city’s police department. A movie starring Al Pacino as Serpico was produced in 1973 and highlighted five years of torment that Serpico endured. Testifying before the Knapp Commission in 1971, Serpico said he hoped no future police officer would suffer what he had gone through at the hands of his superiors when he went public with police corruption.

Yet when Cefalu discovered the procedures for getting authority to wiretap were being circumvented by ATF and reported it to his superiors, they told him to forget it unless he wanted to be reassigned to Fargo, ND. He went over the heads of the Phoenix office and reported the infractions to Washington, which told him if he ever broke the chain of command again, there would be severe consequences. He was officially reprimanded on trumped up charges five times, ordered to get a psychiatric evaluation, given two termination proposals, sent on long assignments to separate his from his family – and all of this had the official sanction of his bosses. The worst part, Cefalu said, was that people in the bureau who had been his friends for 20 years ignored him. They had gotten the message that to be seen with Vince is hazardous to your career.

Cefalu co-founded CleanUpATF.org, an online forum to disclose corruption in the agency. Stories flooded in.

The Issa committee labored on summoning members of ATF, DOJ, and Homeland Security to appear and answer questions about the government’s role in F&F, who knew what and when, details, and names. Documents were so redacted that they made no sense. Some documents were totally redacted and thus useless. Most witnesses were uncooperative. One of the subpoenaed witnesses was "restationed" to Iraq, putting him well beyond the committee’s reach. Eric Holder’s testimony gave new meaning to the term buffoonery, at one point causing Issa to conclude:

It appears your latest testimony has reached a new low. You now claim that you were unaware of Fast and Furious because your staff failed to inform you of information contained in memos that were specifically addressed to you. At best, this indicates negligence and incompetence in your duties as Attorney General. At worst, it places your credibility into serious doubt.

The White House circled the wagons. Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, said in an October 2011 press briefing in which a question regarding F&F came up,

The bottom line is the Attorney General’s testimony to both the House and the Senate was consistent and truthful. He said in both March and May of this year that he became aware of the questionable tactics deployed in the Fast and Furious Operation in early 2011 when ATF agents first raised them publicly. He asked the inspector general to investigate the matter, demonstrating how seriously they took them.

Obama told reporters, "I have complete confidence in Attorney General Holder, in how he handles his office," causing Issa to respond:

The President has said he has full confidence in this attorney general. I have no confidence in a president who has confidence in an attorney general who has in fact not terminated or dealt with the individuals, including key lieutenants, who from the very beginning had some knowledge, and long before Brian Terry was gunned down, knew enough to stop this program.

Issa’s committee obtained emails that made hash of Holder’s testimony, causing him to go from "I didn’t know about the operation until a few weeks ago" to "I knew a year ago, but didn’t know any details" to "my aide was informed of the details right after Brian Terry’s death." But Holder has been consistent in refusing to accept responsibility for F&F. Asked by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) of the Senate Judiciary Committee, if he had apologized to the Terry family, Holder said he had not. Asked, then, if he had contacted them, Holder again said he had not. His rationale? "It is not fair to say the mistakes that happened in Fast and Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry."

Both Terry and Zapata were ATF agents, both were killed, and both were part of Homeland Security headed by Janet Napolitano, former two-term governor of Arizona and familiar with the state’s Mexican drug violence. Yet in testimony before a Senate committee in September 2011 Napolitano denied knowing anything about F&F – despite the toll it had taken among her agents.

But Pavlich’s sources say otherwise. "When she says that [she] and Attorney General Eric Holder have not discussed it, that is a lie. That’s why they keep asking her those questions in the Judicial, Oversight, Homeland Security Committee hearings. They’ve asked her that same question twice and she’s lied twice," said an anonymous source. "There are five emails linking her to Holder. They go back to two days after it happened – the first email was two days after Brian was killed." The emails show Holder discussing Brian Terry’s death with Napolitano. Custom and Border Protection agents also report to her and would have to have had Napolitano’s permission to let guns cross the border. Moreover, parallel Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports have to be written for every ATF report by the co-case ICE agent who briefs Napolitano. There is no way she could not have known about F&F.

But even in the unlikely event that Holder kept her in the dark, which emails refute, she won’t get off without consequences. Lying under oath to a congressional committee carries perjury charges. "Let me tell you one thing about Janet," Pavlich’s informant said, "Janet will be lucky if she does not to go to prison."

In the final analysis, the lingering question is: What was the purpose of F&F? Only a fool would believe the government’s answer that it was to take down the drug cartels. How was it to accomplish that? Sure, the guns that walked across the border could be connected to a crime scene – after the fact, of course, but not before. But neither the guns nor the crime could be connected to a drug lord. If the purpose was to gather evidence against straw purchasers, why weren’t they arrested before they crossed the border with what has been estimated as nearly $700,000 worth of guns?

The one sure thing that F&F did is connect Mexican gun crimes to American gun shops, even though their illegal gun sales were forced by ATF under threat of losing their seller license. Was that the purpose – to make a case for gun control laws that otherwise would never make it through Congress? Obama and his coterie of Leftists are avowed opponents of the Second Amendment. While the F&F fiasco was happening, the Obama administration used it to expand the government’s gun database by requiring all of the 8,700 firearm dealers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to report all sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles within five consecutive business days, if the rifles are larger than .22 caliber and use detachable magazines. Obama would like to see this highly controversial executive order made the law of the land for all states.

An argument could be made – which is logically consistent with the known facts in F&F – that ATF was "deputized" by the Obama administration to sell guns to bad guys knowing they would use them to commit mayhem, and thus proving a lie that border state gun shops, particularly those selling assault weapons, are the cause of Mexican violence. The hoped-for public outrage would pressure Congress to reinstitute the assault rifle ban, which Holder says remains a policy priority of the Obama administration.

Suppose Obama is reelected in 2012. How might he advance his anti-gun agenda? Unless the Republicans and Second Amendment Democrats are routed in the fall – an unlikely possibility – Obama won’t have the legislature to help him. Nor will he have the country behind him. The NRA has four million members, one in three people owns a gun, and Gallup says reinstatement of the assault rifle ban, support for new gun laws and gun regulations, and public anti-gun antagonism is at an all-time low. But Obama has shown in his first four years that he doesn’t need Congress to get his agenda enacted. He uses executive orders – as he and Eric Holder have done in enacting the expanded gun registration database.

A reelected Obama can also structure the federal judiciary with more judges who are anti-Second Amendment. A Washington DC federal district judge upheld a suit against the Holder four-state gun database executive order. Obama can also stack the appellate courts. He has already appointed two Supreme Court judges – Kagan and Sotomayor – who oppose individual gun ownership. As Thurgood Marshall’s clerk, Kagan wrote anti-Second Amendment memos and drafted a Clinton executive order outlawing high powered rifles. Sotomayor has argued that the Second Amendment is a collective right, not an individual one, and that local governments have the authority to limit gun ownership.

Although Hillary Clinton has said she’s had it with a second term as Secretary of State, she and Obama support allowing the UN to regulate US gun laws. Shocked? Obama said his administration supports the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Its provisions extend even to accessories like scopes and magazines. President Bush refused to participate in this treaty, but Obama has said he’d like to see the treaty ratified as a way to show America’s respect for international norms – translated: to show that we Americans are civilized in a world that includes Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Islamic radicals, and other paragons of civilized behavior.

The UN’s definition of "criminal activity" in the treaty is so broad that an American gun owner in Tennessee could find himself prosecuted for owning a hunting rifle. Hunting weapons have not been excluded from the treaty. And even if it were, why would Americans allow the officials they elect to be dictated to by unelected UN bureaucrats, many of whom represent countries best described as thugocracies? If you don’t have enough to worry about, read the details of the ATT, which should be ready to go to press in July. This treaty will require every country to keep track of weapons sold or transferred and report transactions to the UN! Guess which countries won’t abide by this provision.

Finally, a second Obama term could bring us more F&Fs. In his 2013 budget, Obama stripped language that would prevent other F&Fs from happening. Wonder why?

There has been uncommon secrecy surrounding the murder scene of Brian Terry. When Napolitano’s aide, US Attorney Dennis Burke resigned to pursue a private sector career, the Terry case was transferred out of Arizona to San Diego where a federal judge immediately sealed it, preventing the Terry family or media from seeing any of the information in the case. Using a stunt only the federal judiciary would pull, the reasons for sealing the case are sealed.

Yet details continue to leak out. Two guns were found at the Brian Terry murder site which were traced to F&F. Eye witnesses say there was a third gun and the serial number of the missing gun was taken. But its existence has never been revealed. Why?

The investigations of F&F thus far have revealed that the FBI was working with at least six informants. These were truly bad guys – killers with shady pasts. They were able to infiltrate Mexican cartels because they once were – or still are – members of them. Senator Grassley and Darrell Issa believe one of the informants was a double agent who was communicating or conspiring with someone the ATF was observing. Pavlich has an anonymous source who allegedly told her that the third gun at the Terry murder scene was hidden by the FBI because it was linked to their confidential informant or his brother. If so, the ultimate tragedy for the Terry family would be that their son was killed by an F&F weapon provided by the country he served and fired by a man paid and now protected by a US government agency.

Fast and Infuriating – Part I

Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve casually followed the news on the government program called Fast and Furious. I knew that it had something to do with gun-running and the US government’s attempts to track the flow of illegal guns into Mexico which were being used in gun-related violence in that country and ours along the border states.

Then I heard an interview of Katie Pavlich, the news editor of Townhall magazine. She spoke about her just-released book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up, and I was so shocked by what she had to say that I immediately ordered the book and spent this past Sunday afternoon reading it. My blood pressure rose with each of its 200-plus pages. I urge you and your friends to read it before voting in the 2012 election.

This story hasn’t developed legs because, predictably, no Fast and Furious investigative reporting has been done and published by the mainstream media. The exception is Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and three reporters with the Los Angeles Times. Pavlich compares this scandal to Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair, but unlike those scandals, we don’t see the non-stop reporting, heads rolling, a presidential apology. No, we see the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major metro papers giving Obama the cover he needs in a close election year. If this scandal becomes widely known and believed, Obama will not be reelected and the Democrats will lose both houses of Congress.

To keep within the word budget of my blog, I can only give the highlights of the Fast & Furious scandal, which is unfolding as I write. A Contempt of Congress resolution has been prepared this week to be served on Eric Holder. Two Democrats have signed on and 31 Democrats wrote a letter to Obama asking him to order Holder to testify and produce documents. It’s risen to that level of seriousness in a showdown between the legislative and executive branches. Let’s hope Speaker Boehner has the guts to bring the resolution to the floor of the House for a vote. 

This blog will cover two weeks. Even then I’m leaving out a lot of important detail. I hope these two blogs will whet your interest in reading the book. Full disclosure: I have never owned a gun in my life and I have never been a hunter.

Fast and Furious (F&F) began as a program under the Bush administration except it was then called Operation Wide Receiver. Its purpose was to interdict the illegal flow of arms into Mexico. When the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) lost track of some of the guns that crossed the border, the program was shut down.

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is an avowed opponent of Second Amendment gun ownership rights. In Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote of stories his grandmother had told him about white men with guns who terrorized the Kenyan village of his ancestors. Moreover, Obama was mentored by Lawrence Tribe, the liberal anti-gun Harvard law professor who influenced Obama’s positions on many social issues. Candidate Obama famously spoke derisively of Southerners (who are more likely than Northerners to grow up with guns) characterizing them as “clinging to their guns and Bibles.” It’s hard to read Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up without believing it was part of a larger plan to scuttle or severely limit Second Amendment rights from the start.

Years ago the ATF was staffed by people whose careers had started as street cops but transitioned their career to wear the gold badge of an ATF officer. They worked their way up the organization by hard work, not influence and politics. But somewhere along the way, all of that changed. The old bosses who wore cheap suits from Sears and stuck an old six-shot Smith and Wesson in their rear waistband were replaced by guys who wore monogramed shirts with French cuffs. The last thing they wanted was gun oil on their Armani jackets. The old dogs who spent decades on the street perfecting their craft as ATF agents were gradually replaced by wunderkinds with little in the way of street smarts which comes from shoe leather police work.

In 1995 Time magazine described ATF as “the most hated federal agency in America,” no doubt helped by Janet Reno’s use of ATF to engineer the infamous Ruby Ridge killings of Vicki Weaver and her teenage son and her later incineration of 75 Branch Davidians including 20 children and two pregnant women. Within Reno’s second-rate mind there was always a third-rate mind struggling to get out. As her tenure thankfully drew to a close in 2000, her mismanagement of the Elián Gonzalez affair showed us what happens when stupidity and power are combined in one person. ATF was shifted to Homeland Security when that agency was created partly to resuscitate its fouled-up image.

Another change in ATF came with the Obama administration’s redefinition of who the bad guys are. Under Wide Receiver they were the straw purchasers who bought the guns as agents for the drug lords. And they were the drug lords who wreaked havoc in Mexico and the US border states. But as we shall see, over time under F&F, the bad guys became the gun dealers who not only sold the guns to the straw purchasers but, knowing the sales were illegal, were ordered by ATF to make the sales. The dealers were told that ATF was after the big fish, not the couriers. And the dealers were reminded that their licenses and livelihoods could be taken by the ATF at any moment if they didn’t play ball.

During one of his visits with Obama, Mexican President Calderon and Obama had a joint news conference. In it, both presidents had the gall to ignore the cartels that were making billions from illegal drug sales in the US, they had the gall to ignore the corrupt Mexican police, who many times were in cahoots with the drug lords, they had the gall to ignore the Mexican politicians who were bribed by the cartels to look the other way … and instead both presidents pointed their fingers at the American gun dealers who had been set up by F&F.

The Phoenix lead case agent for F&F was Hope MacAllister. One of her direct reports was John Dodson, a straight shooter, former Virginia state patrol officer who had joined ATF in order to work on big federal cases and see them through to the end instead of having the feds take away jurisdiction. MacAllister gave Dodson the names of 45 straw purchasers who would be visiting local Phoenix gun shops to make illegal buys. Dodson was told that he was allowed to observe and follow, but he could not arrest an illegal guy buyer. He could tap cell phones, but not text messages – which was the way the drug lords communicated with their straw purchasers. The gun buys were allowed to “walk” right over the border into the hands of the cartels. Dodson was stunned by the operation. In his training he was told no one left for home and hearth until an illegal gun purchase was found and firearms were back in enforcement hands. But F&F was different.

One of the purchases Dodson observed from an unmarked car over a live video feed – but was prevented from interdicting – was made by Jaime Avila in November 2009.

On December 15, 2010 an alert was issued by the US Attorney’s office of the ATF that shots had been fired in a shootout near Nogales, AZ and that a border agent was down. The agent was Brian Terry. He was dead. The gun that killed him had been purchased by Avila and was one of two found at the murder site. Although ATF agents had been told to keep their mouths shut, some had had enough of the incompetence in ATF and the F&F operation. Whistleblowers and two bloggers revealed the existence of F&F to the public at CleanUpATF.org. Moreover, they disclosed that guns were allowed to “walk” into Mexico without the knowledge of the Mexican government.

Anonymous users of the website were livid in their comments. They had protested that Mexican authorities were intentionally kept in the dark, but their protests had been overridden by the Gucci-shod bureaucrats in the Phoenix ATF office and ultimately their higher ups in Washington. These were not hare-brained conspiracy theorists. Bloggers Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea used their network of ATF informants to vet the information that was anonymously passed to them. The F&F genie was out of the bottle.

Vanderboegh and Codrea contacted the offices of three senators known for their steadfast support of the Second Amendment – Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Charles Grassley (R-IA), and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). The senators were shocked that a government agency charged with preventing illegal gun trafficking would actually perpetrate it. Despite the risk to his career, John Dodson came forward and gave closed door testimony to Grassley and his staff. He gave the grisly stats – hundreds of Mexicans had been murdered with guns bought illegally in the US with the cooperation of the ATF. Dodson was granted whistleblower protection. But being the straight-up agent he was, he reported to his ATF superiors what he had done when he returned to Phoenix. His bosses called him into a private office and ordered him to write a repudiation of his testimony. He refused.

Grassley demanded an explanation of F&F from the acting director of the Phoenix ATF office, Ken Melson. Melson refused. Grassley reminded him that interfering with a congressional investigation is a felony. He also reminded him that interfering with or retaliating against a whistleblower, such as demanding a retraction from Dodson, is also a felony. Melson sought advice from Attorney General Eric Holder’s deputy, Lanny Breuer who assured Melson that the DOJ supported him 100%. When a response was finally sent to Grassley, it repudiated the claim that ATF supported the sale of weapons to straw purchasers. The letter went on to lay down a marker that the DOJ would not cooperate further because ongoing investigations were in process which conveniently prevented further revelations.

But the hits just kept on coming.

On February 15, 2011 two special immigration and customs enforcement agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila, were driving on a busy Mexican highway, headed back into the US after a meeting in Mexico City. Their Chevy Suburban was armored and the car carried diplomatic tags, but the agents weren’t armed because Mexican law prohibits it. A car pulled up beside them and gestured that they should pull over. They refused. After a brief car chase, they were forced off the road, disabling the vehicle. A man approached carrying an AK 47. Zapata lowered the window slightly to show his diplomat badge. Ignoring it, the assailant shoved the barrel of the gun into the car and let loose with a hail of bullets, killing Zapata instantly and wounding Avila severely in the legs. The AK 47 was traced to an F&F purchase.

Now the mainstream press, specifically Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, got interested. She first reported the existence of F&F and then interviewed John Dodson on air. He told Attkisson all of the details of the F&F operations, and then he added that she now had the testimony of a first-hand eye witness and he dared anyone listening to say he was not telling the truth. When Attkisson asked if Dodson had any words for the family of Brian Terry, tears welled in his eyes as he said that he was sorry for their loss and by coming forward he had now done all he could for Brian.

After months of her digging up details on F&F, the White House decided it was time to give Attkisson a piece of its mind (if it has one.) Communications Director Tracy Schmaler contacted her by phone and screamed at her. White House spokesman Eric Shultz let fly a stream of expletives at her. Why couldn’t she be reasonable like the New York Times and Washington Post, they asked?

“I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it,” Attkisson said later. The New York Times and Washington Post weren’t being “reasonable” they were acting like the press secretaries for the White House.

Because the Democrats have the majority in the Senate, Senator Grassley has no subpoena power to compel the DOJ to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee of which he is the ranking minority member. However, the Republicans have the majority in the House and since the 2010 election which gave it to them, Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform has used his subpoena power to make a number of Obama administration officials sweat in his committee room. He planned a “no holds barred” investigation of F&F. “It’s going to be acrimonious, there’s no question. [Obama] has been one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” Issa said on the Rush Limbaugh show just before the November 2010 elections put him in the Chairmanship. Now he intended to prove it.

On March 16, 2011 Issa wrote a letter to the head of the ATF giving him until the end of the month to provide the documents he and Grassley requested. ATF did not comply. Two weeks later Issa issued his first subpoena – to Melson. Issa demanded details about Terry’s murder, the weapons found, emails, internal memos – a laundry list of documents – so that he could get the names of the DOJ officials who authorized this “fatally stupid” program. ATF remained uncooperative, citing “ongoing investigations” that, if you can believe it, prevented elected representatives of the people from overseeing the activities of unelected bureaucrats. Issa would not be put off. If DOJ failed to comply with a congressional subpoena, Eric Holder would be held in contempt of Congress – something the Obama administration doesn’t need in an election year.

Issa was determined to get Holder on the record under oath and on May 3, 2011 he found his opportunity. Holder was to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, of which Issa is also a member, about routine activities of DOJ. The day before he was to testify, Holder and Janet Napolitano (Head of Homeland Security which includes ATF) visited the White House. Since both are cabinet officers, the procedure for their visits is to sign the log and give the purpose of the visit. The log for their visit has no purpose. It shows only that they were to meet with Obama in the East Room. It’s inconceivable that F&F was not discussed nor that Obama was not briefed on their appearance on Capitol Hill the next day.

It would take too much space to include Holder’s testimony before Issa in this blog. You can read it for yourself in pages 94 through 100. Suffice it to say that Holder was evasive and contradictory. One could conclude that his testimony under oath was not truthful, which is a polite way of saying he lied.

The next month on June 15, 2011 Issa set a committee hearing of the F&F affair. For the first time some of the whistleblowers would publicly tell what they knew about the ATF and DOJ involvement. Dodson was summoned. The day before his testimony was to be given, he was handed a gag order from DOJ forbidding him to speak about F&F lest he compromise an “ongoing investigation” – the same canard DOJ cooked up to stonewall congressional investigation of this operation. Dodson ignored the order and testified anyway, saying F&F was not a botched “sting” operation, it was mandated from the outset to put “loads” of weapons in the hands of criminals. Agent Peter Forcelli, also a whistleblower, said murders will be committed for years to come because of F&F. Brian Terry’s mother and family testified that to this day, the government had refused to give them the details surrounding Brian’s death. Dodson wept as he listened to the Terry family speak about a man he never knew.

(Continued next week)